West Lancashire Family Learning Festival collaborates with About the Town for a family writing competition…

The ‘West Lancashire Family Learning Festival’ is a collaboration between Shares Lancashire Ltd which is a group of over 20 primary schools in West Lancashire, West Lancashire College and lots of other community organisations.

The festival is funded by West Lancashire College with the aim of creating inspirational, engaging and fun learning opportunities – for families to experience together – across the local area.

So far, there have been sewing workshops with Artisan Partisan, Cookery Courses with Birchwood Junk Food Café and Gracious Grub, Graffiti Workshops with The Creative Hub, Boxfit at Birch green ABC and much more!

As part of the festival, we collaborated with About the Town to create a writing competition for families to take part in.

The challenge was set for families to come up with a story that celebrates something amazing about our community. In 300 words or less, we asked families to write a newspaper report telling us their story. We hosted both an in-person workshop at St. John’s Primary School and one online, to invite people to join us and learn more about journalism and writing for magazines.

We loved reading the entries and are thrilled to share our top pick! It was difficult to pick just one, as all the families worked so hard on their entries! However, we plan to display their fabulous work in the Concourse Shopping Centre, so keep your eyes peeled on the About the Town Facebook page for more information on that.

We hope you enjoy reading this amazing winning entry as much as we did!

The Winner is 9 year old Milana from St John’s School! Not only does Milana get her work printed in our magazine, but she has also won 4 Cinema Tickets to our fabulous local cinema Capitol Cinema.

“I would really like to tell you why I really love St John’s school.

My name is Milana and I am nine and my sister is 12 and I really love the school and my sister used to come here.

My school is really unique because it starts with a timeline and runs throughout the whole school. This helps us remember the past from history

In our school we have an amazing Fishtank and sometimes our teachers work there, and some of our students sit out there to work.

In our school we have amazing school meals and they are absolutely delicious. My sister also love them when she came here.

In our school we have amazing lessons because we play bingo in maths and do school activities. It makes me feel really happy going back to school or just walking into my classroom.

We have learnt about so many amazing topics. My favourite topic is art because I love drawing and I also love cutting sticking.

Our school has so many fabulous clubs to go to. I enjoy going to sports club because I love doing dodgeball, that is my favourite sport.

My headteacher is amazing because when it’s someone’s birthday she pulls out a birthday chair. One of my old teachers is called Miss profit. She was an amazing teacher to have. Sadly she has left now but I have my amazing teacher Miss Derome.”

Quotes from my teacher:

“I love reading books because it can transport you to another world and take you to adventures without even leaving your home.”

“I love to work at St John’s because all of the staff, families and children are very friendly and welcoming. We follow our school motto to live in love.”